Vanity Fair: “Sex Trafficking of Americans: The Girls Next Door”

We’re glad to see this impressive 5/24/11 article is the most popular at VanityFair.com today. Among other things, it notes how escort ads in The Hartford Advocate facilitate prostitution. As Northampton honors the abolitionist and feminist legacy of Sojourner Truth this weekend, perhaps our local Valley Advocate will take a long, hard look in the mirror. The ads to the right are from the Valley Advocate’s May 26 issue.

Some excerpts from the Vanity Fair article:

“He called me a stupid bitch…a worthless piece of shit… I had to tell people I fell off stage because I had so many bruises on my ribs face and legs… I have a permanent twitch in my eye from him hitting me in my face so much. I have none of my irreplaceable things from my youth.”—From the victim-impact statement of Felicia, minor prostitute-stripper enslaved by trafficker Corey Davis…

There are more young American girls entering the commercial sex industry—an estimated 300,000 at this moment—and their ages have been dropping drastically. “The average starting age for prostitution is now 13,” says Rachel Lloyd, executive director of Girls Educational and Mentoring Services (GEMS), a Harlem-based organization that rescues young women from “the life.”

…There are basically two business models: manipulating girls through violence—that’s called ‘gorilla’ pimping—and controlling them with drugs,” says Patel, who prosecuted the case of New York–based trafficker Corey Davis, a.k.a. “Magnificent”.

…Forbes [a pimp], Scates notes, was a master at singling out, on the high-school campus or at the shopping center, the vulnerable girl with abysmal self-esteem. “And,” she says, “he sensed what lines would be most effective on which girl.”

…Caroline, the 4-H girl, whom Forbes had preyed upon several years earlier, when she was 17, notes, “Customers like it if you’re high, because they can take advantage of you.”

…Buying girls like livestock is not unusual. Cheryl, a GEMS girl, at about 14 was sold by one pimp, “Love”, to another pimp, “Junior”, for $600… In fact, the price for an adolescent female slave is far lower than it was in the mid–19th century, when, adjusted to today’s dollar, the going rate was roughly $40,000, the price of a car…

…[Paris] marketed them in The Hartford Advocate either under these exotic pseudonyms or by means of such time-tested come-ons as “Naughty Housewives”, “Gorgeous Blondes, Pure Pleasure, No Boundaries”, and “Girls, Girls, Girls!”

… Caroline calculates that she converted her body into well over $1 million in cash for just one of her pimps, a former driver for Paris…

Paris’s captives (as various girls’ statements corroborate) were not permitted to refuse a john any request, no matter how frightening, harmful, vile, or degrading—be it videotaping anal rape, beating them black-and-blue (the evidence of which would excite admiring comments from Paris), or smearing them with puke. “Johns are even more dangerous than pimps,” says Caroline, who had her own close encounter with a necrophiliac. (Homicide is the No. 1 cause of death among prostituted females, ahead of aids.) …Before an audience of his cronies, Paris took pornographic photographs—of Gwen on all fours, for instance, naked except for a dog collar and a leash. “We couldn’t use the pictures in court because they were too prejudicial,” says one agent of the law…

… Most of the johns were startled to learn that the girls were not acting of their own free will—75 to 80 percent of prostitutes don’t. The men believed the ads, and the legend of the Happy Hooker. Each of them also assumed they were the one exception to the rule of the repulsive customer…

…“a common theme with every victim is that they came from a dysfunctional home with no positive male role model.”

…Scates and her task force were “halfway through the case,” she says, when they stumbled upon sex-trafficking laws, recent, but little-known, federal statutes that have reclassified severe forms of pimping—such as those practiced by Paris and Forbes—as modern-day slavery, in violation of the 13th Amendment, and punishable by life sentences…

The unlikely trafficking-abolitionist coalition—consisting of secular social-justice advocates, faith-based groups, black activists, second- and fourth-wave feminists, liberals, conservatives, Democrats, and Republicans—shares a peculiar adversary in the form of trafficking skeptics, coming largely from the left. The Nation, for example, ridiculed the “‘sex slave’ panic”, and both Slate and City Pages questioned the alarming statistics published by the Department of Justice, the State Department, and non-government organizations such as ECPAT and the Salvation Army. “All the numbers we have on trafficking are inaccurate,” avows Deirdre Bialo-Padin, chief of the domestic-violence bureau of the Brooklyn D.A.’s office. “They’re too low. It’s an underreported crime. Who is going to raise her hand and say, ‘Hi, I’m a trafficking victim!’ when her family has been threatened? With the right laws in place, we will get harder numbers.”

…Krishna Patel, Dr. Sharon Cooper, Sergeant Chris McKee, and Detective Scates all agree that the single greatest frustration of rescuing trafficked girls is finding a safe haven for them. The Rebecca Project for Human Rights estimates that there are only 200 residential beds dedicated to this purpose in the entire country, 13 of them at GEMS… The second-hardest part is finding them treatment…

As of 1999, johns [in Sweden] are punished by up to six months’ imprisonment, traffickers are locked up for 2-to-10-year hits, and prostitutes are offered medical care, education, and housing. As a result, prostitution has been reduced by 50 percent in Sweden, and the purchase of sex, which is understood to be a human-rights abuse, has decreased by 75 percent. In contrast, Europol studies show, nations such as Holland and Australia, where prostitution has been legalized, have become lucrative, low-risk magnets for international sex-slave drivers and organized crime…

Abolition isn’t front-page news today; it’s immigration policy and legislation. We hear about raids and deportations taking place across the nation, here in Massachusetts, and in Western Massachusetts. The slaves we read about in the United States are exploited immigrant workers, or sexual slaves.

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